'Phoenix Rising Essay\r'

'The adolescent adult story phoenix boost: or how to survive your life by Cynthia D. Grant is a candid fond storey abtaboo the serious effectuate of seventeen-year-old Helen Castle’s death from malignant neoplastic disease on her family. The story is told done the eye of Jessie who has been traumatized by her older sister’s death. Jessie and the opposite members of her family begin a better process, while Helen, whose world we see through Jessie comes to terms with a life that seems impetuous and unjust to Jessie.\r\nShe tonicitys pain, anger, loneliness, confusion and withdrawal abate-to-end the novel. The family is shattered. Its new dynamics atomic number 18 realistically revealed with the already strained relationship mingled with Lucas, and the father that become explosive. Jessie reads on in the journal to learn Helen’s feelings as her cancer progresses, which ranges from morbid despair to exalted hope that is made more moving to the revie wers reading along with her. The setting of the story is white, comfortably middle-class, California suburbia.\r\nThe characters in Phoenix Rising are of average give-and-take and are raised above universe stereotypical characters by the pain, reflection, and eventual developing of Helen’s death forces upon them. They remain straight to their backgrounds and natures throughout their trials and adjustments. It is the mark of Cynthia D. Grant’s talent that the reader never doubts they are reading this novel through thinkable teenage eyes. The central character of the novel is Jessie, and the one who is most dangerously touch by the older sister’s death.\r\nJessie’s tendency is not only to idealize her sister fashioning her feel worthless, and unattractive but she also feels that she has failed to dispatch Helen and talk to her about her illness making Jessie shut herself off from her father, mother, her friend Bambi, Helen’s blighter Bloomf ield, and their next-door neighbor; minute Sara Rose. Jessie not only stops eating toward the end of the novel, she also shuts herself off more in the long run refusing to leave her room.\r\nJessie’s brother Lucas is the smorgasbord family philosopher. On the surface, however he plays a role of a rebellious spring chicken whose love for loud rock music. He is an exceptionally good electric and acoustic guitarist and this puts him at odds with his father, whom he engages in arguments at the slightest opportunity. Jessie’s hard-working couturier father seems fixated on his role as a family provider and Lucas as the antagonist. Jessie tells the reader â€Å"My father thinks he won’t cry as long as he keeps screaming.\r\nIt is as if the father and the other members establish been so traumatized by the Helen’s death that a kind of smooth role-playing is easier for them than facing their world and moving on with their lives. Jessie’s mother seem s simply to have been bludgeoned into being a relatively peaceful person who can do little more than to keep up with the demand household chores, to weep for her oldest daughter, Helen as thoroughly as the self destructive, Jessie and to drink several(prenominal) glasses of wine to dull her pain. twain more important characters round out the characters in this novel.\r\nOne is Bloomfield, who is always called by his last name. He is Helen’s boyfriend and the other is Bambi. Bambi is both sister’s plump, loud mouthed, and mildly sex-crazed friend. Jessie reads further into the Helen’s journal and discovers Bloomfield is not the fair-weather friend she has criticized him as being. Similarly, she finds there is more to the tattooed, fake nailed Bambi than meets the eye. She is surprisingly admirable for her down-to-earth, her common sense tycoon to cut through the silliness that ordinarily surrounds her.\r\n'